Wanna Be an Entrepreneur? Skip the Ivy League

The rising mountain of student debt is forcing some to abandon startup dreams. Over at Accelerators, Vivek Wadhwa, vice president of academics and innovation at Singularity University, offers up some simple advice: If you want to be entrepreneur, don’t apply to elite, expensive colleges.

My greatest disappointment after joining academia was to see my most promising students accept jobs at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. Engineering students with ambitions to save the world would instead become financial analysts—who used their skills to “engineer” our financial system. Or they would take grunt jobs in management consulting—another waste of valuable talent.

Why would they sell their souls? Because they had no choice, the burden of debt they amassed while getting their degrees was just too great. They had six-figure student loans to repay and couldn’t take the risk of joining a startup or founding their own business.

These students were at the Masters of Engineering Management programat Duke University. But it is the same for students I mentor at Harvard and Stanford. Unless they have a full scholarship or very rich parents, they usually have to trade their idealism for financial security. The Wall Street Journal recently brought this issue to life in an article titled Student-Loan Load Kills Startup Dreams.

I can’t blame the students. I would probably do the same if I was in their shoes.

Student loan debt is the reason I don’t advise students who want to become entrepreneurs to apply to elite, expensive colleges. They can be as successful if they go to a relatively inexpensive public college. It is the same in India and China as it is in the U.S. I have done three research projects which reached the same surprising conclusions.